Reed Boats, Patchwork and Fossils

We've been so busy around here. Too busy to blog, it would appear :/
Mostly, they've been carrying on with all their usual activities - cornet, singing, swimming, drama, Little Ninjas, beavers, scouts and more singing, as well as extras - Jazz parades, HE workshops, Scout camps, Halloween, Bonfire Night and two weeks of free cinema with National Schools Film Week....

The Boy and friends' Egyptian reed boat

The Girl and friends' Egyptain reed boat

And when at home, we've been trying to do music practice - cornet for the Girl and xylophone for The Boy, maths, spy school (The Boy), Story of The World (we finally made it to the Greeks), English (The Girl got newfound enthusiasm and did 15 pages of her book in one day!), Five in a Row and lots of crafty stuff.
I've mainly been knitting gloves and mittens and The Girl has been learning how to do American style quilting thanks to another HE mum :)

We've also been doing some work on fossils and learning about Mary Anning for our next bookgroup session. The book this month was Stone Girl Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning of Lyme Regis by Laurence Anholt. Conveniently, the BBC put on some Mary Anning related programmes - True Stories Part 1on iplayer, a secondary schools programme, the 1st of the Dinosaurs episodes of Time to Move on BBC schools radio. And yes, I do have to dance around the living room with them....it's cheaper than a gym ;)
The BBC also have an audio slideshow of her life, and a news article of the ichthyosaur fossil that she found returning to Lyme Regis after 200 years..
We looked at our fossil collection and used the Fossil Detective Field Guide to identify them. This was a free publication from the OU via the BBC a few years ago (I knew it would come in useful one day :D) but you can download it for free from here.